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The founding Hollywood movie, Birth of a Nation, celebrated the Ku Klux Klan. The first talking picture, The Jazz Singer, was a blackface film. Gone With the Wind remains the all-time box-office success. From their beginnings, Michael Rogin claims, motion pictures created a national culture by taking possession of African Americans. Blackface, White Noise investigates Hollywood's roots in the most popular original form of American mass culture, blackface minstrelsy.
Through its use in films from Uncle Tom's Cabin and Birth of a Nation to Forrest Gump, motion picture blackface becomes an aperture opening onto major issues of American national identity: the meanings of whiteness, the role race has played in turning settlers and immigrants into Americans, and the tangled connections that have bound Jews to African Americans in popular culture and liberal politics.
Immigrant Jews inherited the blackface role in vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, and Hollywood; Blackface, White Noise treats burnt cork as their rite of passage to white America. Arguing against those who subsume racial under ethnic identities, Rogin demonstrates that blackface presided over an ethnically inclusive and racially exclusionary melting pot.
Juxtaposing movies like The Jazz Singer with such early civil rights films as Pinky and Gentleman's Agreement, he shows how the blackface tradition infected even those motion pictures that wished to repudiate it.
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Subjects
Jews, united states, Jews in motion pictures, African Americans in motion pictures, Jews in the motion picture industry, Jews, Cultural assimilation, Blackface entertainers, Jewish entertainers, Noirs américains au cinéma, Juifs dans l'industrie cinématographique, Juifs, Acculturation, Blackface (Artistes du spectacle), Artistes du spectacle juifs, PERFORMING ARTS, Film & Video, Reference, Person of Color, Films, Joden, Artistes juifs, Artistes noirs, Noirs américains, Au cinéma, FilmShowing 2 featured editions. View all 2 editions?
Edition | Availability |
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1
Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot
May 29, 1998, University of California Press
Paperback
in English
0520213807 9780520213807
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2
Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot
1996, University of California Press
in English
0520921054 9780520921054
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WorldCat
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Book Details
First Sentence
""Owl Jolson," the hero of a 1936 Warner Bros., Looney Tunes, and Merry Melodies cartoon, is thrown out of his father's house because he wants to sing "jazz.""
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- Created April 29, 2008
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July 29, 2024 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
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